Phone Story is a game for smartphone devices that attempts to provoke a critical reflection on its own technological platform. The game reflects upon the present-day troubling global supply chain that produces the materials needed to create a mobile phone. Phone Story takes the player through four short games that emphasise this supply chain, taking the player through coltan extraction in Congo, outsourced labor in China, e-waste in Pakistan and gadget consumerism in the West. By making the player control several oppressors, the player is made symbolically complicit in the supply chain.
Phone Story brings a hidden reality that is ingrained in the continuing historical relationships and power dynamics of neocolonialism to the forefront. The game seeks to make players into situated subjects aware of their place in the chain of power relations and the footprints of colonialism in our current global age (Navarro-Remesal&Zapata, 2018). Phone Story helps to seriously engage with the supply chain by linking technologies and their associated labour, and the material and geological agencies performed by humans and non-humans (Wan, 2019).
